connection

our capacity to establish deep and profound connections in friendship strengthens all our intimate bonds.

All of this speaks to a major access factor: a trust in disabled people by disabled people, an openness to a practice of letting people experiment with access tools instead of locking up access and crip tools and doling them out balefully, one at a time.

The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other.

The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.

When I can do the impairment-related parts of my routine around someone, that’s intimacy, a gift of letting each other into our most private worlds.

What becomes apparent is that we may be more interested in finding a partner than in knowing love.

I am always amazed by how much courageous trust we offer strangers. We get sick and enter hospitals where we put our trust in a collective body of people we don’t know, who we hope will make us well. Yet we often fear placing our emotional trust in caring individuals who may have been faithful friends all our lives. This is simply misguided

How horrible, but also how real, how bright, that touch would have been. There was a power in being the object that pulls out people’s worst selves. There’s pleasure in moving away from the hopeful unknown and into cruelty’s indifferent absolute.